Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (2010)

I was at a sold-out showing of Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief yesterday. It was just me and about a hundred fourth graders and their teachers. So my experience of this film is as much about how the boisterous tykes in Mrs. Esposito’s class responded as what took place onscreen. It boils down to this: They liked it. They really liked it. I can be convinced.

Based on Rick Riordan’s series of young-adult novels, The Lightning Thief is the first installment of young Percy’s (Logan Lerman) adventures. He is a teenage boy struggling through school with ADHD and dyslexia and at home with his hygiene-challenged stepfather (Joe Pantoliano) and downtrodden mom (Catherine Keener). We first see him dreamily submerged in his school’s pool, dark hair floating around him.

Or, as the girls in Mrs. Esposito’s class put it: Is he naked? Woooooo.

On a school trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Greek/Roman wing, he discovers three interesting things. One, that his name is a cognate for that of Gorgon-slaying, nation-founding demigod Perseus. Two, that for some reason, he is able to read ancient Greek better than he can read English. And three, that there is a terrifying winged creature threatening to kill him if he doesn’t give the lightning bolt back.

This last one prompts the people around him – his seemingly wheelchair-bound classics teacher Mr. Brunner (Pierce Brosnan), his hobbling best friend Grover (Brandon T. Jackson), and his mom – to come clean with Percy about his true identity. He’s really a demigod, the product of his mom’s love affair with Poseidon.

The lightning bolt that Percy is accused of stealing belongs to Zeus (Sean Bean), who believes that his adolescent nephew is in cahoots with Poseidon (Kevin McKidd) to overthrow him as the king of the gods. He gives Percy just one week to give it back or else the gods will wage war against each other with Earth as their battleground.

Percy comes to learn that there are others out there like him. Enough for a place called Camp Half Blood, run by Mr. Brunner in his true form as a centaur named Chiron. Like Percy, these supernatural teens have no connection to their godly parents thanks to a decree issued from Mt. Olympus months after he was born. His classmates include Luke (Jake Abel), the good-looking son of Hermes, Grover who is really a man-goat hybrid called a satyr with the implied sex drive match, and Annabeth (Alexandra Daddario), Athena’s saucer-eyed ass-kicking progeny.

Or, as the boys in Mrs. Esposito’s class put it: She’s hot!

Percy’s mom is kidnapped by Hades (Steve Coogan), who wants the lightning bolt for himself. So Percy, Annabeth, and Grover, aided by Luke who stays behind, embark on an adventure to Hell to save her. But they first have to collect enough of Persephone’s pearls to ensure that they can get out once they’re in. This takes them to Medusa’s lair in New Jersey, the Parthenon in Nashville, and the temple of the Lotus Eaters, fittingly a Las Vegas casino.

The movie really picks up once these travels start. It’s like the Odyssey meets Harry Potter. No surprise there, since Percy director Chris Columbus also helmed the first two of the wizarding films and borrows heavily from both. For example, the villains play to exaggerated levels that are more humorous than scary. To adults, Uma Thurman’s black pleather dress, turban, and hammy delivery as Medusa will seem like high camp. To the kids, it signifies that she’s meant to be scary without actually being scary.

Or, as the entirety of Mrs. Esposito’s class said when they saw her for the first time: Booooooo.

As with the early Potter films, there are no acting pyrotechnics here. The young stars deliver functional performances of scared, brave or defiant at the appropriate moments. Likewise, the special effects are nothing to write home about. The best of these are the CG of Chiron’s and Grover’s animal halves and a trident made of water that Percy conjures up when he defeats a foe near the end of the film, to cheers all around from the fourth-graders.

I haven’t read Riordan’s book series, so I can’t say how true the film was to his writing. But it was refreshing to me, that unlike the slavishly adapted Harry Potter & The Sorcerer’s Stone, this film did stick to a 120-minute run time. As much as I love the tales from Hogwarts, I’ve never understood how the directors expected their pint-size target audience to sit through three hours or more with nary a bathroom break.

The last hour of the film is well paced and enough fun for you to be carried away by the story. Also, did I mention that the entrance to Hell is in Hollywood? It’s little touches like these, along with some racy satyr humor and leather-clad appearances by Bean and McKidd (Borimir and McArmy to me) that will help adults swallow this little Flintstones vitamin. And if their kids are anything like the youngsters I had the pleasure of watching this movie with, they will eagerly applaud.